NASA has awarded Boeing and SpaceX contracts worth a total US$6.8bn to finish developing their commercial crew transportation systems by 2017.
The US space agency said the contracts, split between US$4.2bn for Boeing and US$2.6bn for SpaceX, will end…
NASA has awarded Boeing and SpaceX contracts worth a total US$6.8bn to finish developing their commercial crew transportation systems by 2017.
The US space agency said the contracts, split between US$4.2bn for Boeing and US$2.6bn for SpaceX, will end its sole reliance on Russia for flights to and from the International Space Station.
Privately-held Sierra Nevada had also been in the running for the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contracts, and is now expected to consider alternative customers for its Dream Chaser vehicle. It had received US$212.5m in funding under the previous phase of the programme, along with Boeing’s US$460m and SpaceX’s US$440m.
The latest funding stage will cover the development and certification of Boeing’s CST-100 and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicles, including at least one test flight per company with both NASA and commercial crew members aboard.
NASA said that, once they have been certified, each contractor will conduct two-six crewed missions to the space station.
“This space agency has long been a technology innovator, and now we also can say we are an American business innovator, spurring job creation and opening up new markets to the private sector,” said Kathy Lueders, manager of NASA’s commercial crew programme.
“The agency and our partners have many important steps to finish, but we have shown we can do the tough work required and excel in ways few would dare to hope.”
The US has been relying on Russian Soyuz rockets to get to low Earth orbit since retiring its Space Shuttle in 2011, and will pay about US$70m a trip until 2017.
Engine independence progress
Strained political tensions between Russia and the US have added pressure on the latter to move away from the Soyuz for its ISS missions.
It has also helped accelerate a search by United Launch Alliance, which lofts the majority of US government satellites, to find a domestic alternative for the Russian RD-180s engines that power its Atlas 5 rockets.
ULA announced plans today to jointly develop a new engine with rocket maker Blue Origin, founded by online retailer Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Called BE-4, Blue Origin has already been working on the engine for three years and said its partnership with ULA covers a four-year development process, with full-scale testing in 2016 and first flight in 2019.
BE-4 is a liquid oxygen, liquefied natural gas (LNG) rocket engine that claims to deliver 550,000-lbf of thrust at sea level. Two of them will be used to power each ULA booster, providing 1,100,000-lbf thrust at liftoff.
Blue Origin recently lost out to SpaceX in a tender to find a US launcher to occupy a historic launchpad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and had also competed in the early stages of the space agency’s search for a commercial crew transportation system. The secretive company is said to also be working with Boeing on its CST-100 vehicle.
Bezos said: “ULA has put a satellite into orbit almost every month for the past eight years – they’re the most reliable launch provider in history and their record of success is astonishing.
“The team at Blue Origin is methodically developing technologies to enable human access to space at dramatically lower cost and increased reliability, and the BE-4 is a big step forward. With the new ULA partnership, we’re accelerating commercial development of the next great US-made rocket engine.”
SpaceX, which uses its own Falcon rockets for its missions, has meanwhile been battling to break ULA’s monopoly on government launches, under its Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) contract.
General John Hyten, commander of the US Air Force Space Command, was cited telling a conference recently that SpaceX could be certified to launch national security missions as soon as 1 December.
